Global Learning Portal Connects Teachers Worldwide

The great promise of technology is its ability to open new channels of communication that spread information and bring people together.

The Global Learning Portal (GLP) is doing just that.

The portal is a powerful tool for thousands of teachers, administrators, and education policymakers around the world. It offers educators—particularly those in developing countries—online discussions, professional development, and a library full of materials on teaching, learning, and research. Teachers around the world are using the portal to improve classroom instruction.

To equip teachers in developing countries with more computer tools, Sun Microsystems, a Santa Clara, California-based information technology company, donated 10,000 copies of software that has applications for word processing, spreadsheets, and presentations. They also provided the hardware AED needed to build and host the portal.

"GLP has helped me improve my professional skills," said said Ssewanyana Teopistsa, a teacher in Uganda. "For example, I used the GLP Library and read through various lesson plans of mathematics, English and social studies from Zimbabwe and South Africa that helped me enhance my own lesson plans with follow-up activities for my students."

Teachers around the world are using the portal to improve classroom instruction.

The resources on the portal make it a valuable asset to many educators. “This is infrastructure that no developing country could develop and maintain on its own,” said Kurt Moses

Just one year ago, the AED Systems Services Center began testing the portal with educators in half a dozen countries: Brazil, the Philippines, Mozambique, Nicaragua, South Africa, and Uganda.

That phase was important, Moses said, to ensure that the portal was working properly. “We wanted to make sure that what we had was solid, robust, and free of bugs,” he said. AED developed the portal in partnership with USAID and Sun Microsystems.

Exchanging Ideas

Now, the pilot phase is over and the kinks have been worked out, and nearly 2,000 teachers from 78 different countries have signed up to be members of the portal. And they are creating “communities of practice” everyday by sharing their experiences with each other, and offering advice to one another, Moses noted.

For example, teachers in Brazil, Uganda, and the Philippines are currently discussing ways to create a pen-pal program between their students so that they can learn more about the other cultures.

At the same time, they are exchanging ideas about how to teach their students about their different countries and cultures, and thereby improving their own teaching. “These colleagues want to help support student-centered communities of practice,” Moses said.

This discussion was completely self-initiated, said Bruce Geisert, the director of the portal. Educators on the portal create their own topic of discussion, let other teachers on the site know about the forum, and then moderate the chat. “That is the power of the portal,” he said.

In addition, experts on the site act as mentors to other teachers and hold moderated discussions on specific topics. Recently, an expert from the United Nations Development Programme held a three-week long discussion on how to introduce the topic of AIDS prevention into co-educational classrooms, and still be sensitive to the tribal mores of the girls in the class.

“Having a resource familiar with your country and the particular challenges you face is very valuable to these teachers,” Moses said.

Valuable Partners

Moses and his team are also creating partnerships that will help them access more content, peer-review content, and provide more mentoring services for the educators on the site.

Reviewing content is particularly important, said Geisert, because it ensures its quality. “There are a lot of materials out there,” he said. “And we don’t want to promote something until it has been peer-reviewed.”

AED’s participation in the project has been vital, said Moses. “We combine three important elements: a commitment to the development of high-quality education systems; a long history of using appropriate technology to aid development; and one of the largest reaches of any organization, which enables us to work in many countries.”